Boy Scouts Better than Girl Scouts

Robert Baden Powell started the Boy Scouts to drag boys outside and to experience the rugged toughness required to lead. This happened as a result of his witness to the toughness of the youth in India and how they were used to hardship and pain to a level the British male youth was not, and then as he clearly enunciated in his books on Scouting, the work of the youth in the Mafeking Cadet Corps during his service in the Boer Wars.

Why We Need Boys to Toughen Up

I Have Two Hatchets:

I have to clarify that from my listening to former scouts, my experience was extremely different from theirs. The adults in our group were composed of mostly ‘Nam veterans and a professional rock climber who was offered a shot at Everest back when it was invite only(now you can just pay out the nose for the opportunity to have a Sherpa drag your stuff up for you.)

Perhaps the most important leadership decision happened on Toten’Chit day. The Toten’Chit, for you rubes out there, is a card given to a Scout that allows them to carry a knife. When an infraction to knife safety occurs, any outranking scout can take the card and cut a corner off of it. When all four corners are gone, so are knife or blade privileges.

So on knife safety day, all I remember is my buddy, who I will conceal the identity of with an made up name: Collin. Collin is messing around with the hatchets, goofing around holding one in each hand and Seth, who was leading the class, demands his Toten’Chit.

“Give me your toten’chit because I’m going to take a corner off of it.” -Seth
“I have two hatchets.” -Colin

“I outrank you” -Seth

“I don’t think you understand what I just said, I have two hatchets.”

The inference was that Seth had no hatchets and thus was wildly out gunned(out-hatcheted?) We hiked up mountains were other people going up literally the same day died. We were 12. Leeches, snakebites, fist fights just to see who would win were a big part of my childhood. We had a guy with six black belts and we played “Can you Take Scott Down” and almost nobody could. We had a guy flip out and get pissed off and just wave around a giant branch literally larger than him while it was on fire. This was not to impress girls, this was because we were boys being boys. We also cooked, cleaned our pots, and developed advanced methods of keeping our tents dry during rainstorms.

And late at night on camping trips after the dads went to bed, we’d screw around, sabotage each others tents, just horrible stuff. The fathers knew this was going on, and they allowed it. But when it was time to be in formation in our Class A uniforms, discipline was profoundly strict and absolutely nothing was tolerated. The Fathers played a serious role in discipline.

There were a lot of lessons in leadership that served me in the real world when it came time to hire and discipline employees. Getting promoted over people really just means you work for them.

And here’s the thing: There are girls who could have handled that. They would have enjoyed the experience and we would have liked having them along. But what is the goal of the Boy Scouts?

Eagle Scout Versus A College Degree

“The BSA’s record of producing leaders with high character and integrity is amazing” said Randall Stephenson, BSA’s national board chairman. “I’ve seen nothing that develops leadership skills and discipline like this organization. It is time to make these outstanding leadership development programs available to girls.”

If you enlist in the Military Today, (enlist, not commission) an Eagle Scout starts as an E-3, and a college degree counts the same amount: E-3. Texas A&M has a fast track to get in called “wanting to join the Corps of Cadets and Also an Eagle Scout” because the role of Boy Scouting is to create good leaders. There is no way to explain this without biblical terms:

For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Ephesians 5:23

The reason boys need to be outside getting cut, fighting, tying knots, learning to self sustain and deal with the harsh reality of life is because being the kind of leader others will choose to follow matters. That being able to make sacrifices to help others isn’t heroic, or even abnormal, but just merely expected as part of the job. When men are being trained to make sacrifices and toughen up, running up a mountain with their dads and getting into fights and starting fires makes sense. Learning how to handle a knife safely makes sense. Understanding that when you get bit by a snake, you die and there’s nobody to sue that will bring you back makes sense. When you take God out of the equation you just have a bunch of kids in la la land milquetoasting it up.

For the feminists who ask, “well what about men who have a female boss at work?” Don’t worry, God has an explanation for that too, and for those men with women ruling over them, maybe it’s a sign that that God is trying to teach them to get over their issues with women. Maybe God has appointed a woman over you because you are a bad Christian leader, she can do a better job and you need to learn. After all:

Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. -Romans 13:1

That is a good start to a Proverbs 31 women.(For you atheists out there, a Proverbs 31 woman is a term for a smart diligent hardworking Christian female who can handle finances, make shrewd business decisions in a Godly manner, a blessing to her husband, said to be more precious than a Ruby.)

The adulterous woman is mentioned 65 times in Proverbs, but a quick glance of the bible shows that even King David couldn’t help himself when it came to the attractions of women. Like it or not, sex has an impact, and if grown men fight over women, what does this mean for teenagers? In the societal assault on women, hypersexualizing them and convincing them that hook up culture leads somewhere other than ruin, intermingling Boy Scouts and Girls looks like just an attempt by parents to hope their daughter meets a quality husband before the world takes ahold of them.

The Claim Used by Scouting:

“Families today are busier and more diverse than ever. Most are dual-earners and there are more single-parent households than ever before [1], making convenient programs that serve the whole family more appealing. Additionally, many groups currently underserved by Scouting, including the Hispanic and Asian communities, prefer to participate in activities as a family. Recent surveys [2] of parents not involved with Scouting showed high interest in getting their daughters signed up for programs like Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, with 90 percent expressing interest in a program like Cub Scouts and 87 percent expressing interest in a program like Boy Scouts. Education experts also evaluated the curriculum and content and confirmed relevancy of the program for young women.”

What Scouting offers is Good. Why not allow Girls to join? 87% of Parent involved in Scouting want what Boy Scouts has and not what Girl Scouts offers. The solution, instead of making Girl Scouts better, is to convert Boy Scouts into a Gender Neutral environment. There is nothing wrong with this if you do not believe in a religious difference in the sexes.

That being said, the experiences I had in Boy Scouts would probably benefit women, but the goals and roles for women in scouting would be to develop into a quality Proverbs 31 woman, good with her hands and capable of discerning good men from bad, which is entirely a separate entity from the sort of rigid paramilitary structure that the Boy Scouts currently fosters.

Sending a bunch of teenage boys and girls to go camping in the woods with the kind of poor supervision we had in dangerous environments works great in single gender but as a CoEd endeavor has disaster written all over it unless you like babies.